Looks like I'm the lone female dissenter here in the feminist question.
I am not a feminist because I do not believe in the rhetoric I have heard from feminist writers and intellectuals. I believe in equal rights for women, but I do not believe this is a feminist stance but rather a humane one. The risk that I see from the feminist intellectuals I have read is that there is a destructive component to feminism that sees men as inherently subjugating women, that society as a whole is geared toward subjugation and diminution. I simply don't believe that. I think that sex roles (I don't use the term "gender roles", gender to me is a grammatical term pressed into usage in recent times to mean sex) are taught, reinforced and advertised largely by women. Men mostly benefit from them. It is women who played the instrumental role in turning the clock back on the Equal Rights Amendment. It is women, women like Phyllis Schlafly and most recently, Sarah Palin, who believe that there is some strength in maintaining outmoded "traditions" which involve restricting access to family planning information and birth control, limiting and outlawing abortion. I do not believe that feminism addresses the fact that women, themselves, due to their own upbringing and their own determination to suppress progress and equal rights for women, particularly reproductive rights, are at the leading edge of the opposition to an equal society. The real culprit in solving the issues of inequality, to me, lie not in feminism, but in a freedom from religious intolerance and imposing outmoded and extreme religious ideals on society, and on women in particular.
Thanks for posting, Louise. I was hoping you would, because I think I saw you mention somewhere else recently that you're not a feminist, and I was curious about your reasons.
To me, anybody who believes in equal rights for women is by definition a feminist. That's the entire meaning of the term, for me. Now there are plenty of ideas some feminists hold which I don't share, but that doesn't keep me from continuing to define myself (or the women I disagree with, for that matter), as feminists.
For example, in the early '90s, the writer Katie Roiphe published
The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, which argued that feminists exaggerate the extent of female victimization. Roiphe is a feminist, but she favors a feminism that sees women as powerful and strong rather than women as victims. Of course the two aren't mutually exclusive, and I don't agree with everything Roiphe said, but I found her message refreshing and I tend to lean that way myself. The book was quite controversial at the time, though.
Another big area of contention within feminism is the conflict between feminists who see differences between men and women as inherent, vs. feminists who consider them mostly the result of cultural conditioning.
And yet another is the question of whether traditional women's interests and activities are undervalued because they actually hold less value (explaining why women were pushed into them), or does society just consider them less valuable because women do them? Marge_innavera and I got into this debate a few months ago with regard to beauty contests. Are beauty contests inherently more trivial than football?
Anyway, not to get too far off track, because I wanted to address the other part of Louise's post. Yes, I think it is definitely true that women are often the ones who teach and enforce traditional sex roles. Just as in cultures that practice female circumcision, it's usually mothers and grandmothers who encourage and perform it. Women, like men, grow up absorbing the biases and assumptions of their cultures, and many continue to support them even when those biases tend to benefit men. I think it's possible to work to change those biases without blaming them exclusively on men. When I use the term "the patriarchy," it's usually with a certain degree of irony.
